AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation 's Western Research Laboratory are trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier. Although there is some dispute about who is responsible for the original idea, two key players Louis Monier, who wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows, who wrote the indexer. AltaVista names chosen in relation to their corporate environment in Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an Internet search engine on December 15, 1995 at altavista.digital.com.

When launching, the service has two innovations that set it ahead of other search engines, is used in fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter), which can include many more Web pages are believed to exist at the time and running efficient search back-end on more hardware . In the year 1998, used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC Alpha 64-bit processors. Together, back-end machines have 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB hard disk space, and received 13 million queries per hari.Ini AltaVista made the first find, full-text database of most of the World Wide Web. AltaVista is a distinguishing feature of the interface is minimalist compared to the other search engines, a feature that is lost when it becomes a portal, but back when it refocused its efforts on the search function.

AltaVista site is a success. Traffic continues to increase from 300,000 hits in the first day more than 80 million hits a day two years kemudian.Kemampuan to search the web, and the AltaVista service, particularly, the subject of numerous articles and even a few books. AltaVista itself to be one main destination on the web, and in 1997 will generate U.S. $ 50 million in sponsorship revenue.

In 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo!. In 1998, Digital was sold to Compaq in 1999, Compaq relaunched AltaVista as a web portal, hoping to compete with Yahoo!. AltaVista abandoned the search efficient and focused on features such as shopping and free. In June 1998, Compaq paid AltaVista Technology Incorporated ("ATI") $ 3.3 million for the domain name altavista.com - Jack Marshall, cofounder of ATI, has registered the name in 1994.

In June 1999, Compaq sold a majority stake in AltaVista to CMGI, an Internet investment company. CMGI filed an initial public offering for AltaVista held in April 2000, but as the Internet bubble collapsed, the IPO was canceled. Meanwhile, it became clear that this strategy is not successful portal AltaVista, a search service and starting to lose market share, especially for Google. After a series of layoffs and management changes, AltaVista gradually shed features a focus on portals and search again. In 2002, AltaVista was the quality and freshness of the results and a redesigned user interface. In February 2003, Altavista was bought by Overture Services, Inc. In July 2003, Overture itself was taken over by Yahoo.

Free Services AltaVista provides a free translation service, Babel Fish brand, which automatically translates text between several languages .. In May 2008, this service again branded as part of Yahoo!.

AltaVista Search Engine One of the Oldest AltaVista has the honor to be one of the oldest search engines on the Web, because it started way back (this is a long time in Internet years) in 1995 with the first index of Web Internet. Just as a quick age comparison, Google started in 1998, and Yahoo started out as an Internet guide in 1994. Just as quick comparison of the age, Google began in 1998, and Yahoo started out as a internet user in 1994.

Here are some other "firsts" and the famous highlights of AltaVista, directly from the About Us page: • Provide the first Internet Web index (1995) • First multilingual search capabilities on the Internet • The first Internet search engine to launch Image, Audio, and Video search capabilities • Most advanced Internet search features and capabilities: multimedia search, translation & language recognition, and specific searches • Awarded 61 search related patents, more than any other Internet search companies

AltaVista Search Home Page AltaVista home page is sleekly elegant. There is the search bar right in the middle, with a variety of search options tab, including photos, MP3/Audio, news, and search Video.Filter available directly, you can choose to limit your search to only the United States (default), or you can go on throughout the world. You can also give the results in all languages (default), or choose to go with the only English or Spanish.